Following on from my Admech ruleset, I’ve written a pretty comprehensive, though still very-much work in progress Vehicle Plugin for Necromunda
The concept is pretty simple:
It’s all about interaction.
In 40k, a vehicle is a unit in its own right, big, durable, packing powerful weapons and requiring a lot of force to destroy, but ultimately it’s a very shallow experience, you whittle down its hitpoints and destroy it.
It was a little more complex in 7th edition when you could inflict Immobilise and Weapon Destroyed results, but they happened at random and they were never something you relied on tactically.
In necromunda, it’s all about the gang. So a gang vehicle needs to keep that focus.
With that in mind, I wrote my rules around the idea of Crew and Components. When a vehicle activates, all its crew and passengers activate with it, meaning that there are a lot of different things going on. most importantly, the driver controls the movement of the vehicle, fires its hull-mounted weapons and generally acts to direct it.
Gunners operate specific weapons, and have to be seated on the appropriate weapon to use each. So an under-crewed vehicle may not be able to be used to its fullest extent.
Passengers are along for the ride, but since they’re not operating anything, they get to use any weapons and wargear they personally have to fight from the passenger seats.
The Component system is a bit more complex, the idea is that a vehicle is comprised of a Hull, and a number of subsystems.
Those subsystems may be targeted specifically and produce different effects as they are damaged and destroyed. For example:
* Wheels reduce the Movement stat of the vehicle for every wound they take.
* The Engine outright immobilises the vehicle if destroyed
* Weapons may be shot off to reduce its firepower
* Other more esoteric subsystems have their own effects like a Comm relay, which allows the Leader or champion who’s using the vehicle to activate gang members in a much wider than usual bubble.
So the Vehicles in this ruleset are quite direct in implementation, but have a lot of potential tactics and strategies to make them useful and manipulate the flow of the game. Both the controlling player and any foes have plenty to think about, and it should never devolve into a game of “whittle the hitpoints”
In my first test-game, a Sentinel Scout-walker belonging to House Escher was outright hijacked by the Goliath leader and turned against us!
For the purposes of testing, I’ve been building a variety of vehicles.
The two complete ones are the Sentinel mentioned already, and a Bounty hunter on a bike.
This Cave 